I’m starting a run of several lectures on institutions in my growth and development course. By revealed preference, so to speak, I take the institutions literature seriously. But there are some issues with it, and so I’m going to teach this literature from a particularly skeptical viewpoint and see what survives. These posts are going to sound very antagonistic as I do this, which isn’t completely fair, but makes it more fun to write.
This first post has to do with the cross-country literature on institutions. The 1st-generation of this research (Mauro, 1995; Knack and Keefer, 1995; Hall and Jones, 1999; Easterly and Levine, 2003; Rodrik et al, 2004; Acemoglu and Johnson, 2005) regressed either growth rates or the level of income per capita on an index of institutional quality along with other controls. In general, this literature found that institutions “matter”. That…
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Utopia, you are standing in it! 
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